Sunday, August 5th, 2012

"Suffragette City"

A Place To Bury Strangers cover David Bowie

ManimalIt’s amazing what a bed of face-shredding distortion can do to the character of a song. If Oliver Ackermann, who when he’s not fronting Brooklyn sonic anarchists A Place To Bury Strangers is designing and selling the tools of his trade via Death By Audio guitar pedals, needs to offer more compelling evidence for what his goods can do than his own discography, he can certainly point at this David Bowie cover from the 2010 tribute album We Were So Turned On.

The original, which appeared on The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, was no bit of politeness for its time, but with its old school rock’n’roll roots showing and general sense of gleeful abandon, it was still a pretty fun-sounding number. The A Place To Bury Strangers version, on the other hand, thanks to the white noise treatment and echoey vocals, sounds downright sinister – their Suffregette City doesn’t sound like anywhere you’d like to visit. No sir.

Toronto, on the other hand, is somewhere A Place To Bury Strangers seem to like visiting – their closing performance at the ALL CAPS! island festival next Sunday night will be their third time through in less than six months, all in support of their latest album Worship. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust, but David Bowie isn’t doing anything in particular to celebrate beyond the obligatory reissues – and you can’t blame him. He’s probably afraid to come out of retirement lest someone gets Gary Busey and a hologram Sam Kinison to do another cringeworthy introduction to a public appearance.